Commissioned Data-driven PR Research

How do you propel a local bathroom supply store into news headlines around the world?

You choose a topic that relates to what they sell just enough to explain why they’d commission original research into it. In this case: toilets. Then you explore the topic in a surprising, highly visual, and somewhat disgusting way.

The concept I came up with was to reveal how far and wide urine splashes when men pee standing up instead of sitting down. And, as a bonus, determine which aiming technique results in the least mess.

I created a ‘urethral analogue’ to simulate standing urination that matched the external orifice diameter, flow rate, total volume, and spiralled stream shape of the real thing. Then used UV lights and fluorescent liquid to track the splashes.

Over the course of 10 days, I flushed and reset the testing toilet over 200 times, capturing every splash in glorious high-definition. I then compiled the footage into a five-minute video that accompanied the full write-up of the results.

To supplement the experiment, I ran a survey of 680 American and British men.

Original findings included:

• When at home, seven in 10 men said they usually pee standing rather than sitting.

• In every simulation, peeing while standing covered the toilet and surrounding area with splashback that usually remains unseen.

• The furthest distance a droplet flew during our tests was 36 inches – nearly one metre. One in four people surveyed said their toothbrush was within this distance.

• Faced with the reality of splashback their standing urination creates, one-quarter of men would consider sitting down more often in the future.

Which side of the Apple logo has the bite? Does the Burger King logo feature a crown? How many dots are on the Domino’s logo?

Branded in Memory was an experiment in brand recall. I recruited 150 Americans, briefed them on how to use digital drawing software, then set them the task of recreating 10 famous logos from memory.

Based on more than 1,500 drawings created over a period of 80 hours, the results revealed that, far from being stamped perfectly in our collective memory, these ubiquitous emblems largely exist as fuzzy visions in our mind’s eye.

The hardest part of this project was devising a surveying methodology that enabled people of all technical abilities to create and submit their drawings remotely. The most fun part was transposing some of the funnier efforts into real-looking scenes, as if the brands had switched their polished logos for the derpy, half-remembered versions created by the participants.

Original findings included:

• 16 percent of people drew near perfect logos, and 37 percent were good but not perfect.

• Men and women performed equally well (or poorly), regardless of the logo in question, and their level of brand engagement made no difference to their ability to accurately recall the logos.

• On average, younger people drew more accurate logos than older people.

• The most accurately drawn logo from memory by 156 Americans belongs to a Swedish company: IKEA.
  

When Mark Burnett released a data set of 10 million passwords, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to analyse it. By combining it with another dump of five million passwords which included email addresses, I could use the data as a window into how and why people choose their passwords, including:

• The most common passwords

• The most frequently occurring nouns, verbs, colours, animals, fruits, etc.

• Passwords’ typical entropy (difficulty to brute force)

• The most common keyboard patterns (a lazy way to remember passwords)

And, by running the leaked email addresses through a person lookup API, I could see which passwords were used by a range of notable people, including CEOs, Hollywood actors and talent management, journalists, technology professionals working for IBM and GitHub, and even a Division Chief for the U.S. Department of State.

Original findings included:

• Women were twice as likely as men to include the word ‘love’ in their passwords.

• The most used colours were red, blue, black, then green.

• Dogs were more popular than cats.

• The discovery of a previously unknown keyboard pattern: Adgjmptw. Generated by pressing 2 through 9 on a smartphone’s dialpad.

Lovehoney is the biggest sex toy retailer in the UK. When one of its founders asked me what juicy findings I could uncover in their data, I said I didn’t know – but that I’d love to find out.

For the first time, Lovehoney shared its anonymised sales and analytics data with an outsider. One million sales by more than 300,000 people.

The result of my analysis was Down the Rabbit Hole, which I believe still stands as the largest journalistic analysis of sex toy sales ever conducted. To date, it’s been read by more than 100,000 people on this site and data visualisations from the project are featured in a gorgeous coffee table book: Objects of Desire.

Depending on the exact contents of an ecstasy pill, the user can have a great night or a deadly one. In January 2015, shortly before I wrote this piece, four people in the UK died after taking red pills bearing the Superman “S” logo, believing they contained MDMA (the “hug drug”), when in fact they contained PMMA (“Dr Death”). Other pills, also branded with the Superman logo and available at the same time as those containing PMMA, did, in fact, contain the comparatively much safer MDMA.

To find out what ecstasy and molly really contained, I analyzed 27,000 test reports from five different countries, made over a 10-year period. I collected the data from EcstasyData.org –an “independent laboratory pill testing program” launched in 2001 – and PillReports.net.

Over the years, I’ve analysed and mapped drug seizures and arrests across America for many projects and clients.

In two analyses, Busted & Seized, I mapped tens of thousands of drug interdictions across all 50 states as reported by local and national media outlets.

The findings were featured on a data-driven educational show on National Geographic called The Big Picture.